Potions License Review (PS5) – The Life Sim genre has been around for a long time, but it wasn’t until the PS4 generation that I finally wrapped my head around it.

I thank Stardew Valley therefore. Since then, that game has been the benchmark for my expectations of the life sim genre.

While Potion Permit doesn’t live up to that high figure, it’s a great thing for itself.

Potion Permit Review (PS5) – Simplifies the Town Sim formula without losing the genre’s lasting appeal

Healing the Community

Your custom character works for the Capitol as a chemist. On special medical request, the capital will send you to the small town of Moonbury.

Much to the chagrin of the locals, the mayor orders you to cure his daughter of a mysterious ailment.

Not long after you arrive, you find out that the last chemist to come out of the Capitol was causing long-lasting trouble with the city. Needless to say, the populace isn’t thrilled with your presence at all.

Potion Permit’s pixelated visuals take on a more detailed version of what you’ll find in Stardew Valley.

This adds a livelier touch to the visual style without going too far away from what makes the simplistic style special.

An important feature of these types of games is the development of social ties with the in-game community.

Potion Permit keeps that tradition, but streamlines it a bit. Every day you get a relationship status with every person to talk to.

As long as you talk to everyone every day, you maximize all relationships. With every change in relationship status, that character presents you with a side mission to help them in some capacity.

Doing so opens the next relationship layer, and so on to the maximum.

Not all characters can be romanticized, and the character menu immediately indicates whether or not a character can have a relationship.

Depending on your motivations for gaining status with different characters, this will help you focus on characters from the start rather than learning later that they don’t want a relationship.

To make it a little faster, every quest or main event you complete will reward you with a bag of local tea. Gifting that to a resident of the city gives a big boost to their relationship status.

Considering how often these come your way, developing relationships takes no more than a few weeks of in-game time, with just ten minutes or so each day.

Probably the coolest thing about investing in the community is seeing the community itself improve its aesthetic.

One of the first major milestones is motivating urban residents to clean up parks and trails by clearing weeds.

Until then, the formula felt a little rudimentary than other similar games. However, when this happened, Potion Permit got its own spin on the formula, and I love it.

Mixing

During your stay in Potion Permit you will maintain the local hospital and treat the locals as they enter.

Different parts of their body are identified as the problem area and your analysis will show you how to correct the problem.

If you’re new to the problem, you’ll be faced with a mini-game that pretends to be an investigation.

As long as you pass the minigame, you will manage to determine the problem. You then return to your cauldron and make the necessary potion to cure the ailment.

All craft channels through the kettle. While you’re constantly getting new recipes as you progress, you don’t need any specific ingredients to create.

Instead, each recipe works like Tetris and each ingredient gives you a distinct shape. You use those shapes to fill the Tetris-like void and the recipe is complete.

This makes for a welcome simplification of the crafting systems in other games of this kind. Getting specific ingredients can take a lot of effort, and your progress often depends on crafting those items.

With this system, you still have to collect your own materials, but you don’t need the time it takes to grind out different amounts of specific items.

The only limitation here is how many different ingredients you can use at once. As you improve your cauldron, you can use more ingredients. Initially, the game gives you the option to use five ingredients.

If you can’t fill the Tetris-like shape with five of your ingredients, you’ll need to unlock another part of the map and find new items with bigger shapes.

small accidents

However, I find that a few things keep me from seeing Potion Permit as an instant classic. The big one is the way the game delivers its characters. The cast is made up of a wide variety of individuals with their own roles and interests within the community.

At the same time, they lack that certain level of emotional connection I got from Stardew Valley characters. Only a few times in Potion Permit did I stop and just take a situation with a reaction strong enough to react physically as well.

The scenarios are still intriguing, but they don’t have the same look and feel.

You can only collect ingredients by roaming the map and picking them up. These ingredients, even trees, refresh every day, so the development takes very little time compared to other similar games.

This, in addition to other points I mention above, makes Potion Permit a fantastic entry point to this genre.

At the same time, it reduces the level of investment needed to develop the city and community. In addition, the overall attachment to the game world and its inhabitants just doesn’t develop that strongly.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s still a lot of fun to run around and develop the world around you. It just doesn’t have the same level of intimacy. I don’t see this as an inherent negative, however, as the faster pace of the game welcomes far more newcomers than other similar games.

The latest patch has cleared up some glitches, including one that stopped progress completely. However, with this new update, intentionally or unintentionally, a new change appeared. The fishing mechanics, which once showed a line strength gauge for reeling in fish, no longer appears.

Now you have to rely on the movement of the fish and the color of the line. If the line turns red for too long, it breaks. Again, I’m not sure if it’s intentional, but I don’t hate that fishing works this way now.

A fantastic life sim for everyone

The biggest draw to Potion Permit is that it adds simplifications to the city sim formula found in games like Stardew Valley and Rune Factory.

From the get-go, it offers fast travel points, fewer items to collect and manage, and a much simpler system for crafting new things along the way. It’s not as good as other more well-known life sims out there, but Potion Permit is much easier to get into.

Potion Permit is now available on PS5, PS4, Nintendo Switch, PC and Xbox series.

Review code generously provided by publisher.